IHT Rendezvous |
Chinese Activist, Now in New York, Takes a Harder Look at Beijing

Site Search Navigation

Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Chinese Activist, Now in New York, Takes a Harder Look at Beijing

By Mark McDonald June 18, 2012 11:26 pmJune 18, 2012 11:26 pm

Todd Heisler/The New York TimesChen Guangcheng with his wife, Yuan Weijing, in New York on Monday.

BANGKOK — Even after years of detention, rough treatment and harassment in his rural village in China, Chen Guangcheng seemed to hold tight to the belief that Beijing was a shining city on a hill, a place where officials in the central government — if they only knew — would look favorably on his efforts to win legal rights for beleaguered plaintiffs over illegal land grabs and forced abortions.

The human rights activist, speaking to my colleague Erik Eckholm, now sees less shine and more tarnish on the central government.

Erik, who interviewed Mr. Chen on Monday at New York University, writes that Mr. Chen has seen no signs of “an honest inquiry into what many experts call his blatantly illegal treatment over the years, retaliation for agitating on behalf of the disabled, farmers and women who were forced to have abortions.”

“Sounding more defiant than he did right after his arrival on May 19, he threatened to embarrass the Chinese government severely if they did not act soon,” Erik writes.

“If they don’t open an investigation in a timely manner, I will quickly make my next step,” said Mr. Chen, 40. “Then the central government will not have an opportunity to be the good guy.”

His escape in April from house arrest in rural Shandong Province is now well-known — scaling the wall around his house in the night, breaking a foot, stumbling through farm fields while dodging local security goons, linking up with a getaway car, then making his way hundreds of miles to Beijing, where U.S. diplomats outhustled the Chinese police to whisk him into the embassy.

A diplomatic crisis ensued, and after tense negotiations between American and Chinese officials, Mr. Chen was allowed to go to the United States with his family.

A newly published interview with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton substantiates Mr. Chen’s accommodating view of Beijing at the time of his escape, with Mrs. Clinton saying that “he was clear that he didn’t hold the national authorities responsible” for the harsh treatment of him and his relatives.

“He really focused his ire and fear on the local authorities who had mistreated him,” Mrs. Clinton says in the interview in Foreign Policy magazine. “And he had this idea that if only the authorities in Beijing knew what was happening to him, they would help me and my family.”

Mrs. Clinton spoke at length in Beijing to Susan Glasser, editor in chief of Foreign Policy, soon after a deal had been struck for Mr. Chen’s passage to America. (Ms. Glasser suggests that the hard-bargaining Chinese diplomats might have capitulated on a deal with a Secretary of State Clinton because they were “investing in a future with a possible President Clinton.” Mrs. Clinton offered no on-the-record response.)

It was a very personally poignant tale. I have followed this guy. I’ve talked about him. I’ve raised him with the Chinese. He has an incredible, almost — whatever the Chinese equivalent of a Horatio Alger story is. So we were . . . guided by his choices and our values. And we tried very hard to understand what he wanted. And he came into the embassy saying from the very beginning, “I don’t want to leave my country. I want to stay in China. But I want to be able to pursue my studies. I want to live a more meaningful life instead of being kept imprisoned in my house in my province in my home village.”

Actually, I thought that was a very courageous and thoughtful response. And we worked to understand what he wanted, and then we worked with the Chinese to create the circumstances in which he could pursue that, including having his family with him. He hadn’t seen his son for a year, I think. And he never — I mean, he was in such a terrible dilemma because when he escaped, he couldn’t take his wife and his daughter. So he’s alone in Beijing; he needs medical treatment. He actually broke his foot coming over the wall.

And we saw this as an opportunity not only to work with the Chinese government on his particular case, but to really extend our intensive dialogue about human rights and rule of law . . .

Mr. Chen has since been given visiting scholar status at New York University. He and his wife, Yuan Weijing, and their two children are staying in a faculty apartment in Greenwich Village.

“Their children, ages 6 and 10, are attending a public school and picking up English, while Mr. Chen and Ms. Yuan study English for two hours every morning,” Erik writes. “Mr. Chen spends many afternoons meeting legal experts one on one, learning about the American Constitution and the United States legal system — starting, he made a point of saying, with the Declaration of Independence. He plans to learn about disability law, among other topics.”

Ms. Glasser’s interview and an accompanying piece take note of Mrs. Clinton’s emphasis on Asia, starting with making the region her first overseas destination as secretary of state — “a break with tradition meant to signal the region’s newfound strategic importance.”

She quotes an aide to Mrs. Clinton about advice offered by previous secretaries of state: “You’ve got to look to Asia because there’s a lot of work to be done there. There’s a sense out there that we’ve kind of turned our back on them, that we’re just not as present, as engaged, and China’s going like gangbusters.”

Ms. Glasser also asked Mrs. Clinton about her remarks in 2009 that human rights were only a part of the U.S. foreign policy portfolio with China:

I was here 17 years ago saying women’s rights are human rights and the Chinese violate women’s rights all the time, and they pulled the plug on broadcasting my speech. And so it’s not like I was coming to the Chinese new to this.

I have been an advocate for human rights and women’s rights as long as they’ve known of me, and I had heated arguments with Jiang Zemin over Tibet.

So I also needed to send a signal to them saying, “Look, I’m now secretary of state. I carry this whole portfolio, and human rights is an important, essential part of it, but there’s a lot of other business we have to get done.” So yes, am I going to raise human rights? Absolutely.